Transactions among agribusiness agents are not exclusively
carried out on the market, being also governed by alternative types of
institutional arrangements, some of which determined upon contractual
agreement. In the fertilizers sector, the companies intensified the offer
of input packages to farmers, more specifically to soybean producers,
object of this article. In order to acquire the fertilizers, these producers
may choose to use their own financial resources, to obtain resources
through financing with third parties, or they may recur to the said
packages, which include soybean and financial resources in addition
to the fertilizers, referred by the soybean producers to as “exchange”,
since they acquire fertilizer paying with soybean for future delivery.
Thus, the following questions motivate this work: What are the factors
that determine the selection of the soybean producer between alternative
arrangements for the acquisition of fertilizers? Two hundred
interviews were conducted with soybean producers in the States of
Goiás and Mato Grosso. To conclude, packages or arrangements as
bundling may be stimulated by reasons of efficiency, with transaction
costs economy as one of these possible reasons. Risk aversion and trust
leads to the use of the exchange arrangement. Finally, in relation to the
scale, largest soybean producers use the arrangement exchange in a
great deal, differently from what was expected.